Lots of food for thought at gathering of community producers

Karl Jensen, of Sellicks Hill, south of Adelaide, in his local veggie patch. Community gardens don’t pose a threat to commercial food producers. Picture: Naomi JellicoeSource: News Corp Australia

ON World Environment Day in June last year, when Australians were diverted by Julia Gillard’s battle to save her prime ministership, her agriculture minister launched a $1.5 million program called Community Food Grants.

Senator Joe Ludwig made much of the tiny program, an offshoot of the National Food Program launched a fortnight earlier to help build national food capability.

The grants weren’t easy to come by, requiring applicants to find equivalent amounts from others in cash or equipment, yet the offer attracted 364 applications to set up co-operative food gardens and city farms, farmers’ markets and the like. For many small communities that was no mean feat.

Their effort would have heightened the disappointment they felt in February on being told in a letter from the federal agriculture department that a “tight fiscal environment” had put paid to the scheme.

Then to add insult to injury, national vegetable grower organisation AusVeg said it was pleased the scheme was axed, claiming it posed “a potential risk to the national horticulture industry”. Many community gardens, AusVeg said, were run down and didn’t meet commercial standards.

But a commercial grower attending “Food-4-Thought” the sixth national community food-growing conference in Hobart last week, would have left assured that there was nothing to fear from a resurgent local food sector.

In fact, says Costa Georgiadis, presenter of ABC TV’s Gardening Australia program and a keynote speaker at the conference, food gardens don’t compete with commercial growers, which supply big retailers and export markets. They support local communities by helping to market seasonal, local food.

As for the conference delegates, representing an estimated 60,000 community food workers and volunteers around the country, they shrugged off the disappointment of losing the grant money, treated the AusVeg attack as a misunderstanding, and got on with their business.

And what a business it is. Peta Christenson (Cultivating Community), Chris Ennis (Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies), Kirsten Larsen (Eco Innovation Lab, Melbourne University) and Nick Rose (Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance) opened a door on the huge possibilities opening up in the sector in Melbourne and Sydney.

As they told it, farms and community gardens in Australia’s major cities are teaching people to produce food in new ways, helping them develop marketing skills, and providing food for restaurateurs now developing menus for locally-grown food and meat.

In this UN-declared International Year of Family Farming, farms and gardens in Melbourne are now providing for half a dozen kinds of outlets: the Open Food Network, farmers’ markets, online sales, small retailers, restaurants and “fair food” wholesalers. They are helping small retailers to sell their wares under a local food banner, emphasising the value of supporting producers and other local businesses to strengthen the local economy, and helping to eliminate food waste by setting up “food to farm” composting services. And they are bringing all these threads together in the Melbourne-based Open Food Network (OFN).

OFN is a network of online farmers’ markets, open for everyone to take part. By allowing products to be traced from farm to table, it puts control over food back into the hands of farmers, consumers and local enterprises. Potentially, this is a revolution in direct farmer-to-eater communication.

Inspired by similar US and UK online ventures, the OFN is planning to expand well beyond Melbourne, setting up the Open Food Foundation as licence holder of open source software providing local groups everywhere with a free, easy-to-use online food management tool.

IN the next 15 years $100 billion is to be spent developing new coal mines in Queensland and NSW. This will involve the savings of ordinary Australians, raising the question, are fossil fuels bankrupting our nation financially as well as ecologically?

This will be the subject of a live video feed tonight (6-7pm at the Centenary Theatre, University of Tasmania (Grosvenor St, Sandy Bay), from the University of Melbourne, where Ben Caldecott, founder of Oxford University’s Stranded Assets Program, will be guest speaker.

Peter Boyer is a journalist with a special interest in climate and energy.

Comments on this story

Bob Phelps of Melbourne Posted at 4:35 PM April 01, 2014

The local DIY food movement is growing in popular public support and participation. It can play an important part in ensuring sustainable food security and sovereignty for future Australians, provided the nation plans, acts and allocates resources appropriately.
But meanwhile, the myopic midgets who run this country are embarked on agendas that will condemn us and our descendants to ever more dependence on imported food from who knows here. They have no interest in family farmers or feeding us.
Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott have: "commissioned a White Paper to boost agricultureâs productivity and profitability." The draft selectively favours corporate, industrial agriculture that is dependent on agrichemicals, GM seed and other inputs, to produce bulk commodities for export, trade and agribusiness speculation, with minimal local value-adding.
Their draft White Paper is out for your comment and criticism by April 17 at: http://agriculturalcompetitiveness.dpmc.gov.au/
Please answer their questions and have your say, be an advocate for a much better way! Please tell them they are headed the Wrong Way!

Andy Cunningham of Hobart Posted at 10:47 AM April 01, 2014

This is a recent comment by Karen McWilliams, Head of Business Policy and Sustainability, Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia, "Thereâs no question that the carbon bubble is fast becoming a critical financial issue around the world, and itâs one that could represent the next big risk to global financial stability. What we now need to consider, here in Australia is, if the bubble bursts, will we be prepared?"
It is fossil fuel divestment day on the 3rd May, if you would like to move your money to a more sustainable lender or investor head to the Market Forces website.